Eye drop cures blindness in early tests

A new type of eye drop has shown encourgaing signs for the treatment of glaucoma, one of the leading causes of blindness.

A team of Italian researchers have developed a new type of eye drop for the treatment of glaucomaPhoto: GETTY

7:00AM BST 10 Aug 2009

Glaucoma occurs when the optic nerve is damaged, often by high pressure within the eye.

Treatment can delay progress of the disease but can't reverse damage already done.

Now a team of Italian researchers reports that vision improved in three patients they treated.

The tests in people were tried after success in treating rats with the eye drops containing a protein known as nerve growth factor, the researchers said.

The team, led by Alessandro Lambiase of the department of ophthalmology, University of Rome, reported its findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.

Nerve growth factor assists portions of the central nervous system that have been damaged by disease or injury.

In tests it prevented nerve degeneration in rats with glaucoma, leading the researchers to launch the human tests.

The patients, two men and a woman in their 60s and 70s, had advanced glaucoma, some for 20 years or more.

After three months of treatment all patients showed improvements in visual sharpness and ability to detect contrast, the researchers said. Two of the three showed improved visual fields, while the visual field stabilized for the third.

And, the researchers said, the improvements remain even three months after the treatments were finished.

Dr David J. Calkins, director of research at the Vanderbilt Eye Institute, welcomed the finding with "guarded optimism".

Dr Calkins, who was not part of the research team, said the work "deserves a good, hard look," because patients with disease as advanced as the patients in this study had been thought to be beyond repair.

However, the success must be repeated in further experiments, he stressed.

The research was funded by the Italian Ministry of Health and the Italian Ministry of University and Scientific Research.